I wrote about corn beer last week, so it seems natural for me to write about the Whiskey Rebellion this week. The Whiskey Rebellion is one of the few times in American history that food has directly led to violence (food riots in the South during the Civil War would be another example, and I’m not counting the Boston Tea Party because there was only minimal violence).

The Whiskey Rebellion took place shortly after the American Revolution, and occurred because the federal government raised taxes on whiskey to pay off the debts from the American Revolution. Unfortunately, this particular tax hit one group of people particularly hard. Not, as you might think, whiskey drinkers, but farmers in western New York state.

The situation was this: corn farmers in western New York had to ship their corn east across the Appalachian Mountains, to the cities where people lived. Shipping costs were very high because the roads across the Appalachians were terrible, so instead of shipping the bulk corn, the farmers first converted the corn into whiskey and then shipped the whiskey. A lot of corn makes a little whiskey, so the shipping costs on the whiskey were much lower.

The whiskey tax passed by the government upset the farmers in two ways. First, it was a tax only on whiskey, not rum, which was the favorite drink in New England. Farmers were mad that their liquor was taxed but rum was not. Second, it was not a sales tax but a production tax. The tax was collected when the farmers converted the corn into whiskey, not later when the consumer purchased the whiskey.

Farmers were so upset they rioted in western New York state and chased tax collectors out of town. The rebellion was in the early 1790s, when George Washington was president, and his response was to personally lead federal troops into New York to put down the rebellion. This showed that the new country would not take rebellions lightly, but unfortunately, it also showed that the federal government wasn’t really paying much attention to the complaints of common people. The farmers did, after all, have a legitimate complaint, but the government’s response was to force them to pay the tax anyway. The poor farmers had to deal with the problem for another few decades, until the Erie Canal made it much cheaper to ship bulk corn to the East Coast.